How to find out when someone joined Twitter

The Twitter for iPhone app doesn’t tell you and nor are you able to find out in your own settings area when logged into Twitter via your browser. However, it’s easily done, just use this little site

From that page above, you can also add the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar (works fine on Safari for Mac) and, by selecting a lump of text anywhere on a web page (including a tweet in your own timeline or anywhere else on Twitter) that contains a “@name”, clicking it will bring up the site and date that the @user in question joined. It doesn’t matter if they have changed their screen name since joining either

Tweetbot on the iPhone is also handy for this as it shows you both the date any user you select joined Twitter, along with their unique Twitter ID code (which never changes regardless of whether the username is changed or not). There are probably other apps that do the same – feel free to flag them up in the comments if you know of any

Who cares? Well, I find it useful when determining the likelihood of spam and troll accounts when using one of my more controversial Twitter aliases in particular. The troll accounts in particular are generally very new – looking at follower counts especially isn’t very conclusive as these can be manipulated quite easily and over very short periods of time. Nothing is ever certain of course but, the more information the better if needing to profile an account reasonably quickly

Of course, you might just want to know! Just think of the years you’ve *wasted*